Why is Toni Morrison difficult to read?: Nameless, genderless “voice” narrates “Jazz.” Pervasiveness in novels of split personalities.

“You need to be able to read to be able to read. Especially if Toni Morrison did the writing…Reading a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy…Morrison made her audiences conversant in her—the metaphors of trauma, the melodramas of psychology…Much of the writing [in Morrison’s novel, Jazz], seen through the eyes of a wise-weary narrator…” (1).

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/toni-morrison-death-remembrance.html

One reason that a novel like Jazz is difficult to read is that it is not narrated by the “wise-weary” woman that most readers assume it is, as explained in a past post from October 24, 2013, which quotes Morrison:

Who Wrote Toni Morrison’s Jazz?

In a previous post, I quoted Toni Morrison as saying that her characters are autonomous, but she keeps them under control, since, ultimately, it is her novel, not theirs. In terms of multiple personality, the narrator is Toni Morrison, and the characters are her autonomous, alternate personalities.

However, according to Toni Morrison, she was not the narrator of her novel, Jazz. In other words, both the characters and the narrator were autonomous, alternate personalities. To quote Toni Morrison:

“So, when I was thinking of who was going to tell this story…I was looking for a voice…

“So, then the voice realizes, after hearing other voices, that the narrative is not going to be at all what it predicted. The more it learns about the characters (and they are not what the voice thought), it has to go on…I’ve done this in other places but not as radically as here. The thing is, I could not think of the voice as a person; I know everybody refers to “I” as a woman (because I’m a woman, I guess), but for me, it was very important that the “I”…never sits down, it never walks, because it’s a book. The voice is the voice of a talking book…It’s a book talking, but few people read it like that…

“…so no one’s in control.”

So, who wrote Jazz? According to Toni Morrison, it was, subjectively, psychologically, not Toni Morrison. It was, call it what you will—a voice, a book, an alternate personality—a psychological entity other than the one who goes by the name of Toni Morrison.

I am writing this blog, because when writers say things like that, most people don’t hear and respect what they say. But I do. And I hope you will, too.

1. “Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison Speaks about Her Novel Jazz,” an interview by Angels Carabi, 1993. Reprinted in Toni Morrison: Conversations, edited by Carolyn C. Denard, University Press of Mississippi, 2008, pp. 91-97.

October 23, 2013

Pervasive Split Personalities

quotes are from Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Philip Page. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

“The trauma of racism is...the severe fragmentation of the self” (Morrison, “Unspeakable”) (p. 26).

“With her exploration of splitness, Morrison renders the dividedness of the American and African-American cultures: objects are split, bodies are split, psyches are split, families are split, neighborhoods are split, a race is split, a nation is split” (p. 31).

“...the African-American perspective is always at least double, and because the American cultural body is always already fragmented, the American consciousness is inevitably multiple, and the human condition is caught in the endless play of alternatives” (p. 36).

“Pecola [The Bluest Eye] is thus driven to the double division of a split personality and a pariah. Since to a lesser degree most other characters suffer the same double division, the novel implies the inevitability of this pattern: intense external forces (especially racial, economic, and familial) severely strain the characters’ personalities, and in turn those divisions within characters tend to divide them further from others” (p. 51).

“Echoing the other splits, the narration is split among multiple voices.” (p. 53)

“The attempted fusion with another person is most fully exemplified in Sula and Nel’s relationship..Sula and Nel’s near merger into one consciousness …they have difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s…” (p. 68).

“With his multiple identities, Son is a trickster figure, Morrison’s most recognizable one (p. 122)...Having so many identities that he ‘did not always know who he was’…” (p. 124)...Tar Baby is a polyphonic novel (Butler-Evans; Paquet) that has multiple centers and central characters (Rigney) and in which each character seems to have multiple selves (Kubitschek) (p. 132).

Of course, as readers of this blog know, multiplicity is neither unique to Morrison nor a product of postmodernism, since it pervades Dickens, too (see June 2013 post) and is an issue with most novelists to one extent or another.